This invention relates to the designing and detailing of cabinets, and, more particularly, to a computer interactive method of designing and detailing cabinets.
The designing and detailing of the array of wall cabinets presents one of the more time consuming and tedious problems in the interior design of rooms. Cabinets are designed and constructed to fit the available wall space of a room. For some rooms, such as kitchens, storage rooms, and some office spaces, there are normally a large number of cabinets, many of which have particular constructions designed to provide special functions. The cabinets are usually present in vertically displaced groups. The placement and dimensioning of the cabinets is highly constrained by the existing wall space features of the room, such as doors, windows, central islands, and the like. For kitchen cabinets, the placement of appliances such as refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers, and trash compactors also constrains the selection and design of the cabinets.
Equally importantly, the selection and placement of cabinets is determined in part by esthetic considerations. In one form, the esthetic considerations require that some degree of symmetry be achieved. For example, the doors in upper cabinets typically align with doors in base cabinets, so that the array of cabinets appears regular and symmetrical. In another form, the personal tastes of the person using the room are a strong determinant of the placement and dimensions of the cabinets. Homemakers, the greatest users of kitchen cabinets, typically have strong preferences about the placement of the various types of cabinets for storing dishes, pans, utensils, and tools, about the appearance of the faces of the cabinets, and about the convenience of use of the cabinets.
The design is even further constrained by the constructional requirements of the cabinetmaker, such as the need to achieve a proper assembly of the cabinets. Finally, the design is determined in part by the costs to build and install the cabinets.
The general layout of a room of cabinets is a cooperative effort between the purchaser and the cabinetmaker, and such effort is termed in the art "designing" of the cabinets. Once the design is established, a cabinetmaker develops lists of parts, cutting lists, and costs for the design, a process termed "detailing". Traditionally, it has been the practice for the purchaser (or the purchaser's architect) to sketch his idea of a design and provide it to the cabinetmaker. The cabinetmaker evaluates the design to determine from experience whether the sketched array of cabinets is likely to meet the various needs of the purchaser and whether it can be built in a self consistent fashion. The cabinetmaker then usually determines a bid cost to build the cabinets by calculating the product of the cost per foot (determined from the cabinetmaker's experience) times the total length of cabinets required. The cabinetmaker then must prepare complete designs, cutting plans, and instructions for purchasing, cutting, and assembling the required materials into final cabinets.
The traditional approach has many shortcomings. The cabinetmaker is at risk if his bid cost is significantly less than his actual cost to build the cabinets, because either he will lose money on the job or be forced to raise his bid to the purchaser. Bidding is competitive with other cabinetmakers, so that there is a tendency to bid a low price to get the work, but such bidding practice increases the chance of an error and a financial loss on the job. The cabinetmaker spends a large fraction of his time on each job in doing the calculations and preparing the construction plans, a cost that must be included in the job cost. Moreover, because of the great amount of detail required for the 10-40 cabinets typically required in rooms such as kitchens, mistakes often occur in the planning, necessitating rebuilding cabinets or other changes.
From the customer's point of view, the traditional approach does not permit a careful consideration of the various types of designs that are possible in light of the costs of purchase. The customer must ordinarily rely on a single design given to the cabinetmaker, without regard to the possibility that relatively minor modifications in design would reduce the cost significantly or be more useful to the customer.
The principal obstacle to a more controlled procedure for detailing cabinets has been the large amount of complexity in the planning of cabinet construction. Each cabinetmaker has personal preferences, gained from experience, that shape his planning and, consequently, his costs. The layout of cabinets to meet these constraints, as well as the functional and esthetic requirements of the purchaser, is time consuming and often tries the patience of both purchaser and cabinetmaker. The result is that there is typically less attention paid to developing a buildable design that meets the requirements, than otherwise might be given to the project.
In the past three years, there have been introduced computer interactive methods by which a portion of the calculations performed by the cabinetmaker can be automated. The purchaser can view a computer-generated representation of the cabinets, and adjust the design. Although these methods provide an important step forward in the designing and detailing of cabinets, they lack many of the essential features required to improve flexibility and increase convenience. There is therefore a need for an improved approach to designing and detailing cabinets, in which the user has greater flexibility in selecting the design and detailing approach. The present invention fulfills this need, and further provides related advantages.